In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.

They passed out of the shade beneath the eaves and flew into sunglare and silence and it was an action she only partly saw, elusive and mutely beautiful, the birds so sunstruck they were consumed by light, disembodied, turned into something sheer and fleet and scatter-bright.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.

I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfilment in America.

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.

These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.